“That’s a bit close-mouthed even for him.” Mari sighed. “It’s not my place to tell his tales, but if you are to have the holding of that knife, farmer girl, you’d better understand what it is and where it comes from.”
“Yes,” said Fawn firmly, “please. I’m so tired of making stupid mistakes.”
Mari twitched a—provisionally—approving eyebrow at this. “Very well. I’ll give you what Dag would call the short tale.” Her long inhalation suggested it wasn’t going to be as short as all that, and Fawn sat cross-legged again, intent.
“Kauneo was Dag’s wife.”
A tremor of shock ran through Fawn. Shock, but not surprise, she realized. “I see.”
“She died at Wolf Ridge.”
“He hadn’t mentioned any Wolf Ridge to me. He just called it a bad malice war.”
Though there could be no such thing as a good malice war, Fawn suspected.
“Farmer girl, Dag doesn’t talk about Wolf Ridge to anyone. One of his several little quirks you have to get used to. You have to understand, Luthlia is the biggest, wildest hinterland of the seven, with the thinnest population of Lakewalkers to try to patrol it. Terrible patrolling—cold swamps and trackless woods and killing winters. The other hinterlands lend more young patrollers to Luthlia than to anywhere, but they still can’t keep up.
“Kauneo came from a tent of famously fierce patrollers up that way. She was very beautiful I guess—courted by everyone. Then this quiet, unassuming young patrol leader from the east, walking around the lake on his second training tour, stole her heart right out from under all of them.” A hint of pride colored her voice, and Fawn thought, Yes, she’s really his aunt. “He made plans to stay. They were string-bound—you farmers would say, married—and he got promoted to company captain.”
“Dag wasn’t always a patroller?” said Fawn.
Mari snorted. “That boy should have been a hinterland lieutenant by now, if he hadn’t… agh, anyway. Most of our patrols are more like hunts, and most turn up nothing. In fact, it’s possible to patrol all your life and never be in on a malice kill, by one chance or another. Dag has his ways of improving those odds for himself. But when a malice gets entrenched, when it goes to real war…
then we’re all making it up as we go along.”
She rose, stalked across the bedchamber to her washstand, poured a glass of water, and drank it down. She fell to pacing as she continued.
“Big malice slipped through the patrol patterns. It didn’t have many people to enslave up that way, no bandits like the malice you slew here. There are no farmers in Luthlia, nor anywhere north of the Dead Lake, save now and then some trapper or trader slips in that we escort out. But the malice did find wolves.
It did things to wolves. Wolf-men, man-wolves, dire wolves as big as ponies, with man-wits. By the time the thing was found, it had grown itself an army of wolves. The Luthlian patrollers sent out a call-up for help from neighbor hinterlands, but meanwhile, they were on their own.
“Dag’s company, fifty patrollers including Kauneo and a couple of her brothers, was sent to hold a ridge to cover the flank of another party trying to strike up the valley at the lair. The scouts led them to expect an attack of maybe fifty dire wolves. What they got was more like five hundred.”
Fawn’s breath drew in.
“In one hour Dag lost his hand, his wife, his company all but three, and the ridge. What he didn’t lose was the war, because in the hour they’d bought, the other group made it all the way through to the lair. When he woke up in the medicine tent, his whole life was burned up like a pyre, I guess. He didn’t take it well.
“In due course his dead wife’s tent folk despaired of him and sent him home.
Where he didn’t take it well some more. Then Fairbolt Crow, bless his bones—our camp captain, though he was just a company captain back then—got smart, or desperate, or furious, and dragged him off to Tripoint. Got some clever farmer artificer he knew there to make up the arm harness, and they went round and round on it till they hit on devices that worked. Dag practiced with his new bow till his fingers bled, pulled himself together to meet Fairbolt’s terms, and let me tell you Fairbolt didn’t cut him any slack, and was let back on patrol.
Where he has been ever since.
“Some ten or twelve sharing knives have passed through Dag’s hand since—people keep giving them to him because they’re pretty sure to get used—but he always kept that pair aside. The only mementos of Kauneo I know of that he didn’t shove away like they scorched him. So that’s the knife now in your keeping, farmer girl.”
Fawn held it up and drew it through her fingers. “You’d think it would be heavier.” Did I really want to know all this?
“Aye.” Mari sighed.
Fawn glanced curiously at Mari’s gray head. “Will you ever be a company captain?
You must have been patrolling for a long time.”
“I’ve had far less time in the field than Dag, actually, for all I’m twenty years older. I walked the woman’s path. I spent four or five years training as a girl—we must train up the girls, for all that fellows like Dag disapprove, because if ever our camps are attacked, it’ll be us and the old men defending them. I got string-bound, got blood-bound—had my children, that is—and then went back to patrolling. I expect to keep walking till my luck or my legs give out, five more years or ten, but I don’t care to deal with anything more fractious than a patrol, thank you. Then back to camp and play with my grandchildren and their children till it’s time to share. It will do, as a life.”
Fawn’s brow wrinkled. “Did you ever imagine another?” Or being thrown into another, as Fawn had been?
Mari cocked her head. “Can’t say as I ever did. Though I’d have my boy back first if I were given wishes.”
“How many children did you have?”
“Five,” Mari replied, with distinct maternal pride that sounded plenty farmerish to Fawn, for all she suspected Mari would deny any such thing.
A rap on the door was followed by Dag’s plaintive voice: “Mari, can I please come back in now?”
Mari rolled her eyes. “All right.”
Dag eased himself around the door. “How is she doing? Is she healing at all?
Could you match grounds? Or do a little reinforcement, even?”
“She’s healing as well as could be expected. I did nothing with my ground, because time and rest will do the job every bit as well.”
Dag took this in, seeming a bit disappointed, but resigned. “I have you a room, Spark, down one floor. Tired?”
Exhausted, she realized. She nodded.
“Well, I’ll take you down and you can start in on the resting part, leastways.”
Mari rubbed her lips and studied her nephew through narrowed eyes.
Groundsense.
Fawn wondered what the patrol leader had seen with hers that she wasn’t saying.
Did closed mouths run in the Redwing family like golden eyes? Fawn rolled up her bedroll and let Dag shoo her out.
“Don’t let Mari scare you,” Dag said, letting his left arm drift along at her back, whether protectively or for subtle concealment Fawn could not tell, as they descended the stairs. They turned into the adjoining corridor.
“She didn’t, much. I liked her.” Fawn took a breath. Some secrets took up too much space to keep tiptoeing around. “She told me a little more about your wife, and Wolf Ridge. She thought I needed to know.”
Silence stretched for three long footfalls. “She’s right.”
And that, evidently, was all Fawn was going to get for now.
Fawn’s new room was narrow like Mari’s, except this one overlooked the main street instead of the stable yard. A washstand with ewer already filled, piecework curtains and a quilt in a matching pattern, and rag rugs on the floor made it fine and homey to Fawn’s eyes. A door in the side wall apparently led into the next chamber. Dag swung the bar across and shoved it down into its brackets.